Reading Back the Nation: The Expulsion of the Normans

Historical writing was an all-important element in the formation and reformulation of Russian national identity during the rule of both Elizabeth and Catherine II. History, which attracted the attention of Catherine II in the 1780s, first took on central importance in public debate in the mid-eighteenth century.

The debate itself was provoked by the decision of Gerhard Friedrich Muller, the official historiographer of the Imperial Academy of Sci­ences, to present a talk based on his dissertation, 'Origines gentis et nominis Russorum,' at a public meeting of the academy. The talk was given initially at a meeting of the Academy Conference on 23 August 1749, where the decision was made to publish it in the academy's two official languages, Latin and Russian.

What factors contributed to this outcome, and what was their relation to the construction of Russian national identity? To answer these ques­tions, a number of relevant contexts must be considered. One of them is the internal politics of the academy. J.D. Schumacher and Petr Krekshin, the two employees of the academy who raised the issue of Muller 's 'political unreliability,' were in fact his personal enemies and rivals. Muller had numerous conflicts with Schumacher on issues pertaining to the administration of the academy, while Krekshin could not forgive Muller a negative review of his work on the genealogy of the Rus' princes written in 1747. Lomonosov, the author of a number of negative assessments of Muller's dissertation, also held grudges against him. In 1744, Muller had prevented the publication of Lomonosov's textbook of rhetoric.

Another important context that helps explain the course of events and illuminates their broader significance is the nationalist sentiment that marked the age of Elizabeth and the negative attitude of the Rus­sian public to the West in general and to Westerners in their midst in particular. Schumacher and Krekshin's accusations that Muller had assaulted the dignity of the Russian nation fell on fertile ground. They were addressed ultimately to Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the first 'Russian' to be appointed president of the academy (in 1746) after the consecutive rule of four German presidents. Rozumovsky and his former tutor and honorary member of the academy, G.N. Teplov, were trying to establish the court's control over that institution, composed mostly of foreigners whose loyalty to Russia was presumed to be questionable.²⁴ In the eyes of the public, the academy was failing to carry out one of its basic tasks, that of training 'Russians,' and continuing to employ mostly foreigners. In the early 1740s, a number of prominent members of the academy left Russia for the West, taking with them the results of their work, whose publication in the West was regarded as undermining Russian interests. Schumacher, suspected of having a hand in Western publications unfavourable to Russia, was even arrested by the authorities but soon released and reinstated in the academy. In 1744, the authorities reacted to criticism by imposing severe restrictions on the use of the academy's library, archives, and research materials.

Thus the historiographic discussion concerning Muller's disserta­tion took place in a charged atmosphere of suspected espionage and a search for traitors among the academy's foreign members. But what exactly was so harmful to Russian pride in Muller's dissertation? Here one must consider yet another context of the debate - the historio­graphic one. This debate, later known as the 'Varangian controversy,' correctly identified the principal bone of contention - the role of the Varangians in founding the Russian state and nation. Those scholars who considered that role all-important and regarded the Varangians as Normans (Scandinavians) became known as Normanists, while their opponents, who either dismissed the leading role of the Varangians in early Rus' history or considered them Slavs, were dubbed anti- Normanists. In his thesis, Muller presented the main elements of what came to be known as the 'Norman theory.' He claimed that the Slavs had not settled the Dnipro region until the times of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and thus did not possess the glorious ancient his­tory attributed to them by Rus' chroniclers and early modern histori­ans. He also maintained that the Varangians in general and Rurik in particular were of Scandinavian stock. They had conquered the Slavs and given the name 'Rus'' to their dynasty and state.

This was not the first time that such ideas had been expressed in public. Back in 1732, in his introduction to an excerpt from the Primary Chronicle, Muller had identified the Varangians as Normans who came mainly from Norway.

Lomonosov was probably not far wrong when he stated that the pre­sentation of Muller's views at a public meeting of the academy would turn the Russian public not only against Muller but also against the academy itself. It was Lomonosov, then an amateur historian, who pre­sented an alternative Russian view of the origins of Rus' in his numer­ous memoranda on Muller's dissertation. The factual basis for his critique was provided by the Kyivan Synopsis, whose focus on the ori­gins of the nation had finally found appreciation in Russia. Defenders of Russian historical pride had little choice but to turn to that source, whose treatment of the Varangians as Slavs and concept of a 'Slavo- Rossian nation' offered a rebuttal to the views advanced by the early Normanists. Consequently, Lomonosov urged the academy to adopt the Synopsis as the standard text on Russian history. In his repudiation of Muller, Lomonosov rejected his opponent's alleged presentation of the Slavic record as a history of defeats and expulsions from the territo­ries they had originally settled. Lomonosov claimed that the Slavs, whose name he derived from the word 'glory' (slava), and whom he traced back to the ancient Roxolani, had settled the Dnipro basin long before the times of Emperor Justinian.

The outcome of the Muller debate marked a major change in Russian historiography. The treatment of Rurik and his dynasty as Slavs flew in the face of the long tradition of Rus', Muscovite, and Russian historiog­raphy, which considered the foreign origins of the Rurikids a positive factor, not a negative one. In the past, the foreign origins of the dynasty had not only helped Kyivan princes differentiate clearly between the Rurikid clan and the boyar elites but also allowed Ivan the Terrible to consider himself a German and trace his origins back to Emperor Augustus. As late as the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Rus­sian historian Aleksei Mankiev, the author of Iadro rossiiskoi istorii (The Kernel of Russian History), continued to regard Augustus as Ivan's ancestor.²⁸ Now all that was rejected, mainly because of the endless con­frontation with the West, punctuated by wars with Sweden, Prussia, and France, and the backlash against powerful foreigners in the St Peters­burg administration. Given this new outlook, the concept of the nation emerged in Russian historiography as no less important than the con­cept of the dynasty, and both were considered quintessentially Russian.

Lomonosov's historiographic revolution was a sign of things to come in nineteenth-century Russian historiography, but the potential of the new paradigm was less obvious to contemporaries. The debate became a turning point at which Russian historiography failed to turn. Cathe­rine II adopted a different approach to the writing of Russian history. One might assume that the German-born empress was not displeased by a theory that claimed Germanic ancestry for the first rulers of Rus'. In any case, over Lomonosov's protests, the new empress appointed another German, A.N. von Schlozer, as historiographer of the academy - a position theoretically reserved for 'native Russians.' As it turned out, Schlozer was an ardent supporter of the Norman theory.